1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a sensor system operable to monitor environmental conditions within a data center.
2. Related Art
A data center may be defined as a location, e.g., a room that houses numerous printed circuit (PC) board electronic systems arranged in a number of racks. A standard rack may be defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure, 78 in. (2 meters) high, 24 in. (0.61 meter) wide and 30 in. (0.76 meter) deep. Standard racks may be configured to house a number of PC boards, e.g., about forty (40) PC server systems, with some existing configurations of racks being designed to accommodate up to 280 blade systems. The PC boards typically include a number of components, e.g. processors, micro-controllers, high speed video cards, memories, and the like, that dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during the operating of the respective components. For example, a typical PC board comprising multiple microprocessors may dissipate approximately 250 W of power. Thus, a rack containing forty (40) PC boards of this type may dissipate approximately 10 KW of power.
The power required to remove the heat dissipated by the components in the racks is generally equal to about 10 percent of the power needed to operate the components. However, the power required to remove the heat dissipated by a plurality of racks in a data center is generally equal to about 50 percent of the power needed to operate the components in the racks. The disparity in the amount of power required to dissipate the various heat loads between racks and data centers stems from, for example, the additional thermodynamic processing needed in the data center to cool the air.
Equipment or computer racks are typically cooled in bulk with fans that move cooling fluid, e.g., air, across the heat dissipating components. Additionally, data centers often implement reverse power cycles to cool heated return air. The additional work required to achieve the temperature reduction, in addition to the work associated with moving the cooling fluid in the data center and the condenser, often add up to the 50 percent power requirement. As such, the cooling of data centers presents problems in addition to those faced with the cooling of racks.
Conventional data centers are typically cooled by operation of one or more air conditioning units. The compressors of the air conditioning units typically require a minimum of about thirty (30) percent of the required cooling capacity to sufficiently cool the data centers. The other components, e.g., condensers, air movers (fans), etc., typically require an additional twenty (20) percent of the required cooling capacity. As an example, a high density data center with 100 racks, each rack having a maximum power dissipation of 10 KW, generally requires 1 MW of cooling capacity.
Air conditioning units with a capacity of 1 MW of heat removal generally require a minimum of 30 KW input compressor power in addition to the power needed to drive the air moving devices, e.g., fans, blowers, etc. Conventional data center air conditioning units do not vary their cooling output based on the distributed needs of the data center. Instead, these air conditioning units generally operate at or near a maximum compressor power even when the heat load is reduced inside the data center.
The substantially continuous operation of the air conditioning units is generally designed to operate according to a worst-case scenario. Cooling is supplied to the components at around 100 percent of the estimated cooling requirement. In this respect, conventional cooling systems often attempt to cool components that may not need to be cooled. Consequently, conventional cooling systems often incur greater amounts of operating expenses than may be necessary to sufficiently cool the heat generating components by continuously supplying 100 percent of the worst case estimated cooling requirement.